Can the Power of Pine-Sol Boost Site Traffic?

Pine-Sol has been taking a different approach with their marketing efforts lately. They’ve been releasing a series of YouTube videos starring the “Pine-Sol Lady”, the long-time star of the cleaning product’s television commercials. While many of these are quick, interview-like videos that garnered a modest number of views, one in particular has caught the attention of many, many more people, including me. The video once again stars the Pine-Sol Lady,

Pine-Sol has been taking a different approach with their marketing efforts lately. They’ve been releasing a series of YouTube videos starring the “Pine-Sol Lady”, the long-time star of the cleaning product’s television commercials. While many of these are quick, interview-like videos that garnered a modest number of views, one in particular has caught the attention of many, many more people, including me.

The video once again stars the Pine-Sol Lady, only this time she is pranking unsuspecting “product testers.” The video is well worth watching and has already collected over 1 million views on YouTube, which absolutely crushes the viewership of any other video on the Pine-Sol Official YouTube page since its June 4th debut. But on my second viewing (or third, possibly the fourth), I found myself wondering whether anyone who watches the video will actually even think about the product being advertized.

Looking at the daily reach to Pinesol.com, there is no discernible impact of the product’s viral video. In fact, the two more noticeable peaks in reach come in mid-April and early-July, both a month away from the video’s debut. Even looking at daily attention provides no visible indication of the videos success at driving lasting site traffic, as the peaks here come before the video was released.

Going beyond the daily metrics, I checked to see whether the video had any impact on monthly visitation. Since the video was uploaded at the very beginning of the month, I would expect that most of the impact would be contained to June 2012. When looking at unique visitors and total visits for June, both are barely above a 2% increase over May. In fact, a year earlier in June 2011, the domain saw quite the large peak that it hadn’t seen in the year prior or year since. If anything, the success of the viral video on YouTube translated to merely a blip on the visitation to PineSol.com.

The search referrals to the PineSol.com website also do not provide any evidence of branded site benefits from the prank. The top 10 search terms for the month of June 2012 have no mention of the prank at all. In fact, there is almost nothing that stands out between the 2012 terms and the terms from June 2011.

I then thought to see where exactly people who are searching for anything related to Pine-Sol end up. I decided to compare this past June, the month the viral video premiered, and June of 2011, the month of highest visitation in the past several months. Turns out that a lower percent of searches are ending up at PineSol.com, although YouTube does claim the number 2 spot for June 2012 (it didn’t make the top 10 last year).

After all that, it may seem that although the prank was a viral video success, it didn’t do too much for the Pine-Sol brand. But I would think that the video’s purpose may not have been to drive traffic to PineSol.com or cause a spike in Pine-Sol related searches. It was likely intended to get consumers to just think about the product. I know I certainly did.

Comments

Jessica

Greg, this is probably the most entertaining Compete blog post I have read! The video is hysterical. Very interesting to see that it’s hilarity had no effect on its traffic, but then again I’m not going to pinesol.com after watching it.